Huge means extremely big. A huge crowd, a huge mistake, a huge amount of work. It is informal in tone and completely standard in every register short of a legal document.
It is one of a family of size intensifiers — enormous, massive, vast, immense, gigantic — that are largely interchangeable, with slight leanings: vast suits space, massive suits weight and importance, huge suits almost anything. Note that huge is also used for degree rather than size — a huge fan, a huge success — where nothing physical is large at all. The adverb hugely is common and means very: hugely popular, hugely enjoyable.
1adjectivehugeExtremely large in size or amount.
“There was a huge queue outside.”
2adjectivegreatVery great in degree or importance.
“It made a huge difference to her.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
huge is a degree of size.
Also accepted in games: enormous, giant, gigantic
Old French ahuge meant high or lofty, and it may come from a Germanic word for a hill or mound — the same root as Norse haugr. If so, something huge was originally something the size of a hill, which is exactly how the word still feels.
Proto-Indo-European
*kewk-
Proto-Indo-European
*kowkós — hill, mound
Proto-Germanic
*haugaz — hill, mound
Old Norse
haugr — hill
Frankish
*haug
Old French
ahuge — high, lofty, great, large, huge
Middle English
huge
English, today
huge
Built from
From Middle English huge, from Old French ahuge (“high, lofty, great, large, huge”), of unknown origin. One theory derives it from an underlying a hoge (“at height”), from a (“at, to”) + hoge (“a hill, height”), the latter from Frankish haug or cognate Old Norse haugr (“hill”); both from Proto-Germanic haugaz (“hill, mound”), from Proto-Indo-European kowkós (“hill, mound”), from the root Proto-Indo-European kewk-, whence also high.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA